Syria: stop asking questions!

Another veteran foreign correspondent, Mary Dejevsky (Valdai, 1 March 2018), says she sympathises with ‘a dissident strain of thinking…which is at odds with the official consensus’, declaring that: ‘we reject, or at very least distrust, the dominant official narrative, which appears designed at once to get the UK and other Western countries more directly involved and to thwart or discredit Russia’.

In seeking to close down such dissident thought, Times journalists are acting, not as neutral defenders of truth, but as partisan advocates for a particular understanding of the war. Their view, it has to be said, is a minority one: opinion polls suggest that most people in the UK do not support the government’s air strikes on Syria.